After much wait and anticipation, we are excited to announce to you the availability of our most generous and most exciting new (shared hosting) plans ever! All of our new plans are based on our new AHA (Affordable High Availability) cluster, enabling us to offer you a much generous plan on a much reliable platform for a much affordable price.

We have many different plans to suit your needs. All new plans below come with unlimited sub-domains, domain aliases, and mailboxes.

Check out our new exciting plans at http://www.fluidhosting.com/shared/ and switch today! There is no fee to switch your account. So why wait? Simply open a ticket from your control panel to request a switch to our new plan and our staff will be more than willing to assist you!

[Q]: I am an old customers, currently under long term contract. Can I switch to the new plan?
[A]: According to our Terms of Service, we allow you to switch from one plan to any plan as long as you keep the value of the plan the same, if not more (at least until the end of your contract). However, we are currently waiving this requirement to all current customers who wish to switch to the new plan.

[Q]: I have been a long term customers of you, do you have customer loyalty discount/program?
[A]: Of course! We have many customers dating back as far as 2001. If you are one of them, let me thank you and say how much we appreciate your business. As a way for us to show our appreciation, we will give you a month of credit for every year you have been with us when you switch to one of our new plans. Hurry! This offer ends on Friday, October 16th 2009.

[Q]: I see that you are offering five-years plan. Can you tell me more about it?
[A]: As a way to raise further capital, we are offering five-year prepayment plan, for a limited time and limited amount only. This is our best pricing ever. Special priority will be given to customers who have been with us for more than three years. Don't worry, we will not let you stick on this plan; you will be allowed to switch to any of our new plans in the future, should you choose to do so.

[Q]: What is AHA cluster?
[A]: While other hosts are still stuck with the old physical infrastructure, over the past two years Fluid Hosting has decided to take on new Virtualization infrastructure. AHA stands for Affordable High Availability, a concept that we started to develop last year. More than $160,000 in equipment costs and man hours have been invested into this. With complete virtualization on both storage and servers level, we are able to offer you hosting services on a more solid, scalable, liquid platform. Our AHA cluster is composed of an array of Virtual Machines running on a Citrix XenServer Essentials Platinum backed by Dell/EqualLogic iSCSI array with N+1 redundancy built in the infrastructure (redundant iSCSI path, redundant network links, redundant server nodes, and so on). This allows us to optimize our server resources better while at the same time reducing our operational cost, which translates to a cost saving that we can pass to you.

[Q]: Thanks for the increase in disk space. How can we use our disk space?
[A]: Some hosts will try to offer gimmicks to their customers. They will offer a large amount of disk space, yet restrict its use in their fine print. Not with us. You pay for the disk space, you can use it as you see fit, as long as you do not violate our AUP (e.g., storing illegal materials, etc). Do you want some space to store your images online? Feel free to use your disk space. Do you need to backup your files online? No problem. No restriction. Period.

[Q]: You seem to be offering a lot so cheaply. Are you overselling?
[A]: Of course not. We understand that our new plans come late in the game. But the reason is because we do not want to offer something that we cannot deliver. Over the years, many things have been done to ensure that we can deliver what we offer. Our AHA cluster is totally scalable to accommodate your needs. At any point we are able to enlarge the server's disk space and resources, thanks to the complete virtualization in the storage and server layer.

[Q]: Are you sure you are not overselling? What about bandwidth? How about other resources?
[A]: We do not like to oversell what we have. Call us a stubborn and old school, but we like to play it safe. You can use all the bandwidth allocated to you (and even more). The one thing we will monitor is that you do not use the server resources more than your fair share usage. This is still a shared hosting environment where you are still sharing the server resources with other customers. As long as you are utilizing your fair usage, feel free to use all the disk space and traffic allowance you have on your account.

[Q]: I love you guys, how can I help you grow?
[A]: If you have been satisfied with our service and are even more satisfied now for the new plans, help us spread the word. You can refer us to your friends and colleagues. When you refer a friend to us and they inform us about you, both you and your friend will benefit. We will waive the first month hosting fee for your friend. Furthermore, a referral fee of one month of your friend's monthly hosting fee will be credited to your account. But only until 11/30/2009, instead of one month, we will credit you with two months referral fee! You can also help spread the word by reviewing our services through your blogs, web hosting directories, forums, and so on. We always appreciate honest review. And lastly, feel free to send your feedback to us. We would like to hear your feedbacks on how we can improve our services to you and our futurecustomers.

These new plans look really good. What would be extremely helpful in deciding which plan to migrate to would be a chart comparing the OLD plans to the NEW plans. I honestly don't remember what my current plan gives me.

These new plans look really good. What would be extremely helpful in deciding which plan to migrate to would be a chart comparing the OLD plans to the NEW plans. I honestly don't remember what my current plan gives me.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. For less than $10/yr extra I get a greater than 10x increase in disk space and bandwidth. One question - I have SSH access under my existing account. Will that transfer to the new one?

You guys have always been great to work with and I see no reason to look anywhere else for a hosting company.

If I've done my sums right we could make significant savings AND end up with better disk space and traffic limits. Naturally, although perhaps unfairly, this makes me wonder if I'm missing something!

Just for the sake of a little due diligence, are we absolutely sure that performance, uptime and maintenance/support are going to remain at least as good as they've been for the past few years (i.e. there's no hidden catch)?

There seems to be a big gap between the new Value and Economy plans in that the number of SQL databases doesn't match up. With everyone wanting a blog, or using some database driven Content Management System, 15 domains and only 5 SQL databases (Economy) won't work out. The other option is to get 2 domains and 1 SQL (Value), then do a couple Addons. Either way, the $5 per month per SQL fee adds up pretty fast.

We're not going anywhere else, and like the new deals, but might have to scale back rather than scale up as a client in this tricky middle ground.

If I could chime in here, you don't really need 1 database for each website/blog. You can host multiple schemas and collections of tables/views/stored procs for each site in a single database, using the same connection string for each site, but pointing to different tables; or you can use the design pattern (Multi-Tenant Data Architecture) for Software as a Service and use 1 set of tables and just have a client ID key to keep the records separate.

For those who have switched to the new plans, how are you enjoying them? Some have wondered about performance degradation, thinking that we are overselling hard. So, let me know your experience so far.

By the way, today is the last day to get the customer loyalty discount!